Mark Daniels: Supermarkets - we're doing the advertising for them

Tim Martin made an interesting point last week: the pub trade is doing itself no favours by complaining about supermarkets.

I have to put my hand up and say I'm as guilty as many when it comes to having a little moan about the way they conduct their business concerning alcohol but, while I agree with the J.D.Wetherspoon's founder on one hand, I disagree with it on another.

Mr Martin argues that by bringing the cheapness of supermarket booze to the fore, we have inadvertently encouraged the government to raise alcohol tax in an effort to combat their low prices.

This, of course, isn't true - out of anybody selling alcohol at the moment, the big supermarkets are the ones in the best position to simply swallow up (or bully their suppliers in to swallowing up) the increases in duty, and the government knows this. If they had wanted to address the issue of alcohol prices in the off-trade, they would simply have developed a two-tier tax system, but Mr Darling thinks the mathematics of this are too complex for his abacus and, ultimately, unpopular with the voter.

The adverse reaction to the pub trade bleating on about supermarket booze pricing is that it has simply served to raise awareness amongst the general public about how cheap it is to drink at home compared to in a pub.

In much the same way, all the press coverage in January of Wetherspoon's 99p-a-pint deal on Greene King IPA served to handily point every binge drinker in the country wanting to use a pub in the general direction of one of their outlets, without them having to pay for a huge media campaign.

At the end of the day, supermarkets aren't completely villainous. They are, as Tim pointed out in his interview with The Publican magazine, only businesses doing their job. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with supermarkets selling alcohol, in much the same way as there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the idea of the beer tie.

(I heard the collective sucking in of breath through clenched teeth just then...)

The problem with supermarkets selling alcohol, like the beer tie, is not the fact that they exist, but the way in which they are managed and administered.

There has to be something wrong with an industry where members of the pub trade actually find it cheaper to go in to a supermarket to buy booze for their pubs than they do going to a trade wholesaler, but the biggest problem with supermarkets has to be the method by which they sell alcohol, rather than how much they price it for.

This has been highlighted several times - most recently last week, when a Sainsbury's store near Portsmouth had its license to sell alcohol revoked for 48 hours after repeatedly selling to underage drinkers.

I've written before on the fact that supermarkets take a rather lax approach to the sale of a product restricted by law, yet it's always the pubs that take the bashing when it comes to social, behavioural and health problems.

The off-trade, supermarkets most especially, need to have a tighter, more managed control over the sale of their product. The cost of implementing these controls in itself would force them to address the issue of cheap alcohol...